Camtasia Relay 2 Brings Searchable Video to Lecture Capture

TechSmith has released Camtasia Relay 2, an update to the company's flagship lecture capture suite. The latest version adds speech to text capabilities for capturing and indexing audio in presentations. It also includes expanded Moodle support and a wide range of workflow enhancements.

Camtasia Relay is a lecture capture solution that can be used on Mac OS X and Windows systems for classroom recording. It offers LDAP integration and encoding in multiple formats, including MP3, MP4, Flash, and Windows Media, for publishing to a variety of destinations, including common learning management systems and iTunes U, among others.

The latest release lets users search for video based on words spoken by the presenter or text captured from slides. It also provides a visual index of captured materials, with thumbnails. The speech to text and audio slide search features work for the Flash and Silverlight output formats only, according to TechSmith. Silverlight output support is new to Camtasia Relay 2. Also new is enhanced support for Moodle, adding the ability to send notifications through that learning management system when new media are published.

Other new features include:

Enhanced user profile creation and management;

A new tool to display input levels for all attached microphones;

Support for variables for tasks like naming files or filling in notifications; and

Support for selecting a monitor to record when multiple displays are in use.

Grover Saunders, Web media design engineer at James Madison University, was one of the beta testers for version 2. "Thanks to its ease of use and brilliant pricing model, we already have twice as many Camtasia Relay users in one year as we had users of another product in seven years," he said. "As one of the Camtasia Relay 2 beta users, I've been impressed with how much the developers engage customers directly. I can see features coming directly from our conversations."

Camtasia Relay 2 is available now. The recorder runs on Mac OS X and various flavors of Windows, including Windows 7 and XP. The server runs on Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Academic pricing starts at $4,995 for a single-server license. A free trial is also available. Further information about Camtasia Relay 2 can be found here.

About the Author

David Nagel is editorial director, education for 1105 Media's Public Sector Media Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal. A 22-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art and business publications.